Unlike this translated English edition, the French original of this book published with Editions Odile Jacob in 2005 bears the programmatic and highly appropriate subtitle De Yalta à Maastricht. Frederic Bozo, professor at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne), undertakes in his meticulously researched and written study the almost herculean task to place French foreign policy between 1988 and 1991 both on the map of international history and in the line of continuity with the policy of Charles de Gaulle. In doing so, he has to explore, explain, and sometimes defend in detail the visions, tactics, and policies of French President François Mitterrand against the latter's many contemporary and current detractors, particularly in France itself, but also in Germany and the United States. To state it upfront, this reviewer thinks Frederic Bozo has succeeded in his task. The author has made a very careful and even refreshing contribution to balance the historical record by inserting French perspectives with both their grand designs and some inherent flaws into western narratives of the Cold War's end in Europe, still too much dominated by accounts of exclusive American and German agency and sometimes self-aggrandizement.

In seven chapters detailing French diplomacy between spring 1988 and the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the author strives to unfold his main theses based on extensive research mostly in records of the French presidency, the French Foreign Ministry, and in “private” archives of former French officials in Paris. According to Bozo, Mitterrand's France was caught by surprise when the events of 1989 unfolded. Even if the French president would have preferred a more moderate pace of the German unification process, however, Bozo makes strong arguments to defend Mitterrand against the often repeated charge that he wanted to slow down if not impede the events in Germany and eastern Europe. He convincingly shows the French contribution to place German unification into a European and international framework, something German politicians exploited to their benefit at the time more than they wanted to admit later on. Given the shadows of the past, the 1989–90 policies pertaining to Germany by somebody with a personal history like François Mitterrand, not to speak of the overwhelmingly positive attitude of the French public, deserve the proper appraisal Bozo is willing to provide. It also becomes clear that Mitterrand's vision was more blurred when assessing the future American role in Europe or the fate of the Soviet Union through his fixation on Gorbachev and his unwillingness to exploit Soviet economic and financial weaknesses for substantial concessions as (West) Germany and the United States were ready to do. On the other hand, French design was in full swing with its ultimately successful attempts to embed German unification into broader and deeper European construction and integration, thus paving the road to the European Union at the 1991 Maastricht Summit.

The further we move away from the historical events between 1989 and 1991 in Europe the more narrower and nationalist perspectives sometimes seem to evolve with time, in particular in Germany. Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, like his friend François Mitterrand, had to witness a departure from political office marred by scandal and even public vilification. Seconded and amplified by some historians and journalists, Kohl has become extremely bitter against all those domestic and foreign politicians whom he now considers more than ever as skeptics, critics, brakemen, and opponents of the German unification process—as if the latter was supposed to be deterministic, natural, and uncontroversial. Such stands in contrast to actual processes in 1989–90 where constant prescience was hardly any political actor's forte and where constellations and subsequent calculations sometimes changed overnight. The Germans in particular, but also the Americans and the Europeans, were fortunate enough to have Mikhail Gorbachev as long at the helm of the Soviet Union as he was able to hold out there. The years after 1989 established or laid the foundation for monumental events in European history: Germany's peaceful and democratic reunification, the end of the Soviet Union, the eastern enlargement of NATO and the European Community, and the introduction of a single European currency thus establishing a “European Union” through the February 1992 Treaty of Maastricht. It will be Frederic Bozo's lasting legacy to have written a significant scholarly contribution to stake out France's important role during these historical processes with all its merits and flaws, twists and turns.